FAQ Part 1:
Pop-Ups: First, please make sure to allow pop-ups for the Faery Tale Online site to avoid problems. Don't worry, there will be no advertisements popping up, but several game functions use pop-ups.
How do I see my race?Hover your mouse cursor over the symbol of a small blue person next to your character's age.
How do I post my own roleplay?First make sure that you have read the roleplays other players might have written already after your birth. The newest ones are at the top, the oldest at the bottom. Then you can fill your own roleplay into the small "Say" field and click on the "Send" button afterwards. However, as long as your character is younger than 1 ingame year, everything they say will get automatically converted to baby babbling like "gaa goo waaaah" to prevent players from talking like an adult.
Emotes: You can still write emotes to describe your character's actions, though. To do so, surround your text with asterisks, like *text*. Doing this will prevent the conversion to babbling. However, you have to make sure there is nothing, not even a blank space, outside the asterisks or the automatic conversion to baby babbling will still happen. Of course you can also use this function to send OOC messages to your colony. It might be good to let them know you are a new player, so that they will hopefully show some understanding and patience if you make some mistakes in your first days of playing. Emotes don't describe speech, so *Mama, I'm hungry!* would be a bad emote (not even to mention the fact that a newborn should not be able to speak yet
). *The baby is hungry* would not be a great emote either - instead, try to describe what effects the hunger would have on your character, like *She releases a high-pitched wail as her stomach starts to growl.* Inner monologues and thoughts are usually not described in Faery Tale Online, only things that other characters would see or hear, so that they can react to them. There is still a place called "The Faery Tale" for story-telling including inner monologues that I will mention a bit later.
I have no clue who is talking in the roleplays that the other players have written. It just keeps saying things like "man/woman in adulthood". How to change that?Naming: Naming of other characters, of locations and of some special NPC animals is dynamic in FTO, meaning there are no pre-set names that every player would see. Instead, you will learn the names together with your character and can fill them in as soon as you know how a person or place is called. For example, it might be a good idea to mark your character's parents somehow if you have already seen them roleplay and so know who they are. If there was a woman roleplaying giving birth to one or more babies right after your character was born, it is usually safe to assume this woman is your character's mother. To mark them for yourself, just click on their blue "Woman/Man in Adulthood" link above their roleplay and fill in something like "mother" if you haven't been able to deduce their actual names yet from the roleplay that has happened so far. No other players will see what you fill in there, so you could name a character "crazy old guy" if you want. These names you give to characters can be changed at any time and as often as you want.
As soon as you have named someone this way, their name will also show up for you in the list of inhabitants to the right. You will likely be at the bottom of this list because the list is sorted by age, with the oldest characters at the top and the youngest at the bottom. If your character was born together with a twin or even more new siblings, the character born first will be listed before the others. You could also send an OOC message surrounded by asterisks * and ask the players in your colony nicely to give you all names of the inhabitants OOCly to facilitate the roleplaying, though of course things like that can always be done in the race's specific IRC channel as well. Alternatively, you could try to find out who the players of your parents are by asking in the Faery Tale Online facebook group and then having them explain things to you in private facebook messages.
How do I enter the IRC channel for my race?http://joo.freehostia.com/fto/irc/Even if you're not sure what exactly IRC is and if you don't have any client for it installed, this is a fool-proof way to enter the IRC chat room for Faery Tale Online. There are usually several players online there and you can simply ask them if there is anybody of your race online at the moment and what the name of your race-specific IRC channel is.
Where do I see what my parents look like?Once you have found out who your parents are and have given them some kind of name, you can find them in the list of inhabitants to the right. Hover your mouse cursor over the symbol left of their name which is either a blue person if they are online right now or a blue dash if they are offline. You will see two paragraphs there. The first is written by the respective player and describes the individual character. The second paragraph is automatically produced by the game and describes the race that this character belongs to. Some characters also have an image which you can see by clicking on the magnifying glass right of their name in the inhabitants list.
Before interacting with a character you should always make sure to check their race first. It's possible that there are huge size differences that would influence the roleplay, like that between a 5-inch-race and a 3-foot-race or that other racial features would influence the roleplay, for example a mermaid child that can't leave the water to play with some human children on the land. If there is a sentence added that "It appears that this particular being shares some of their racial qualities with some other race", it means that the character is a cross-breed, even though the game won't automatically tell you what the second race is that flows in the character's blood. If you can't figure it out by the individual character description, it will be very hard to tell, unless you have your character ask childishly when they are old enough for it "Mommy, why does person X look different from us?"
Where can I fill in the description for my own character and upload an image?There is a field for your own character description in the top left corner and you will make the players of your character's parents very happy by writing at least a short text here. It is also seen as a sign of activity and will likely help to have your character be fed by others in opposite to the babies who are seen as inactive and given up after some days (which is unfortunately way more than those who are and stay active). Please take into regard the descriptions of your character's mother and father and your character's general racial description before you write anything here. You could also look at the descriptions of other family members for inspiration.
Only visual features of your character should be filled in here, like hair and eye color, stature, height, form of the nose or also more temporary things (if you keep them up to date) like wounds or dark rings around the eyes or reddened eyes from crying a lot, but not invisible character traits like "She is a very kind person who likes to help others" or "He doesn't like raspberries" or emotions like "He is sad about the death of his mother". If your character is a cross-breed and you know the races of both the father and the mother, you can of course mix the racial features in a way that you like. If you are unsure which features would be acceptable in your race, you can always ask people in IRC or in the facebook group. If you want, you can upload an image for your character by clicking on the scroll symbol next to your character's name in the inhabitants list. To do so, you have to allow pop-ups for the Faery Tale Online site.
My character is starving! What to do?First of all, don't panic. Every character gets born in the "starving" state and it's not as urgent as it sounds. It would still take several RL days for a character to die of hunger from there and there is actually a state that is still worse than starving, namely "near death". Just give the players of your character's parents some time to log into the game and give some food to you. Or maybe you already have some food in your inventory? If so, just click on the "eat" symbol next to it. Starving characters also eat food automatically at every tick if they have food in their inventory and if you have not disabled the auto-eat function on the portal screen.
My character's parents roleplayed that they gave food to me, but I can't find any. Where is it?If the food is not in your inventory and if your character is not starving any longer, your character has automatically eaten the food already because of the auto-eat function. Auto-eat triggers only for starving or near death characters at the next tick if they have food in their inventory. If your character is still hungry, feel free to make that known to your parents by crying, fussing around or otherwise bothering them.
When the parents give clothes to my character, is (s)he wearing them automatically?No, you still have to click on an icon in your inventory to equip them. The icon looks like a blue sword.
How many ticks are there? When are they?There is one tick every RL hour.
But it tells me I have only 1 hour of play time for the whole day! How does that work?While you are on the portal screen, no time will be subtracted. Time is only subtracted when you have entered the world and click on something there. Write your roleplays offline in a text file and only enter the world to paste them in, which will only use a few seconds of your daily hour. To read new roleplays, you can enter the game world without worrying. As long as the only thing you click on after entering the game world is the "Portal" or "Logout" link at the bottom of the page, no time should be subtracted. Time will only be subtracted if you click on other links or objects in the game world, start a project, click on the "send" button or whatever else. Clicking the "Refresh Page" button
will subtract all the time you have spent in the game world since entering it. If you have idled in the game world for a bit to read the new posts, make sure to go back to the portal screen first before sending your own roleplays to avoid losing too much of your daily hour. Regarding your own playing time, you can stay on the portal screen as long as you want, but as soon as the influx of new players will lead to error messages appearing that players can't log in because too many others are currently logged in, it would be nice of you to log out completely when you don't actually play, so that another player can log in and check on their characters.
How long is an ingame year?6 RL days.
How long is an ingame day?12 RL hours.
Why does my character not have a name yet?Your character will be mechanically named by the player of the mother. The player might not have logged in yet and might also be living in a different time zone than you, so give them some time. Some parents also like to discuss the naming after the birth and it might take a bit until they have played the scene and decided on a name for your character. Also, there is a bug that sometimes the player of a mother naming a child loses all of their remaining playing time for the day during the naming process on the portal screen. So many players of mothers hold off on naming until the end of a day when they won't need their remaining time any longer.
What if I don't like the name they choose for me?Well, like in real life, you don't have much choice there. You can mechanically enter a nick name for your character into the "Nick name" field, but that would only have the effect that this name is shown for your character in your own interface, not in that of other players. When your character is old enough to talk and make conscious decisions, they could suggest a nick name for themselves to others, but maybe you will get to like your original name after all, given some time. Some names might sound strange for RL circumstances, but they might have cultural background for your race. There are races that name their children after gems or after trees or natural phenomena, for example. If you suggest in such a race to be called Megan or Sam instead, that would not make much sense from the perspective of your character. You could always go with short forms of your name, though, unless that is frowned upon within your specific race.
